Revelations: Parts III, IV & V
A girl, her mother’s faith, and the stories that shaped them both
This is a 10-part story that braids fiction with personal essay. I spent a year and a half working on Revelations—it was all I really dreamt about during that time and long after.
III
There were a few late nights when she would wake up, notice the bright light under my door at the end of the hallway, and enter abruptly. “What are you doing?”
“Just reading,” I would reply without looking away from the page, afraid to meet her eyes. “I have to read it for school,” I lied.
She would cut me with a suspicious glare, then twist the knife with disappointment, “Why do I never see you read the Watchtower or any Biblical literature?”
“I read it all the time.”
IV
“Tell me what those books are about,” she demanded, but I couldn’t stop listening to the chaos whirling outside. Everything seemed to be crashing, falling, breaking.
“If you don’t want to tell me what they’re about,” she snapped, yanking at the switch that dangled under my ceiling light, “I’ll find out for myself.” The light flared like a lightning strike, sudden and blinding.
She opened the sliding closet doors and found my books. Some had been bought at book fairs, but most were from my high school or city library. After turning over the covers of several paperbacks, she found the culprit. It was a YA novel with the word Enchanted in its title.
Alarms blared in her mind. That word was all she needed. Everything became clear: my aloofness during meetings at the Kingdom Hall, my hesitation surrounding door-to-door preaching, my inability to form friendships with the brothers and sisters from the congregation. And now this—a demonic apparition in our God-serving home. To her, my books were like cracks in the house, through which a demon, perhaps many, had snuck in.
She held up the cover and turned it to face me. On it, a beautiful young woman with long brown hair gazed into a magic mirror. “This is Satanic.” Her throat and eyes burned with anger. “Do you know what this word—enchanted—means? It means witchcraft!” The Spanish word she used for witchcraft, brujería, had a more sinister ring than its English counterpart—the word bore razing teeth.
“I haven’t even read it,” I said, trying to restrain my eyes from leaking tears. “I just got it at the library this week.”
“What do you think Jehovah thinks of this?” she asked, shaking the book as she spoke. “I should burn this.” She let it go as though it were made of fire, and it fell on my bed.
The library wouldn’t get it back, she decided. She left my room and returned with a black garbage bag, then proceeded to toss all of my books—several dozen—into it.
“Get up and dump these in the trash bin outside.”
V
“Will you have blood on your hands?” an elder would ask from the podium after he spoke on the importance of preaching the “good news”—las buenas nuevas—or the coming Kingdom of God.
Any day now, Armageddon’s raging fires would fall upon the world “like a thief in the night,” cleansing the earth of sin, but if we followed all the rules and converted enough people, he reminded us, we might have a chance at surviving. We might one day enter the Paradise born in the ashes, free of death and suffering. It would be heaven on earth. My mother always said she would plant a mango grove next to a river, tend a garden with every plant God had ever created.
I'm curious how your relationship with religion has evolved!